There is a kind of loneliness that is hard to name. It is not the loneliness of being alone. It is the loneliness of sitting across from someone and realising they are not really trying to understand you. You speak and they answer, but they miss the point entirely. The conversation ends before it even begins.
Busy lives take the blame. So do screensas well as the relentless pace of the modern world. While those answers are not wrong, something else is happening too. Something quieter. A slow closing of the empathy gap between us, one unread story at a time.
What does reading actually do to us?
For years, researchers have studied the link between reading and empathy. The findings are clear. People who read literary fiction such as stories about complex, real human experiences tend to be better at understanding how others feel. They are better at seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
Researchers Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley found that fiction works like a practice ground. When you read a story, you are not just watching a character from a distance. You step inside their mind. You don’t just learn that a character is sad, you feel it with them. The strange weight of it. The texture. The irrationality. That is something no news article or Wikipedia page can do.
So what happens when we stop?
Here is the question that rarely gets asked: what happens to empathy when people stop reading altogether? One study found that people who read less fiction tended to become more self-focused over time. When you never practice stepping outside your own perspective, you slowly lose the habit and eventually, you lose the desire. The world begins to shrink to the size of your own experience. The same study found something else striking. Exposure to non-fiction, for example, news, essays, reports, was actually linked to loneliness. Think about that for a moment.
Not all reading works the same way
It is also worth saying this, simply reading more is not the answer on its own. What matters is how you read. A person who skims through a book, checking their phone, half-present, does not get the same benefit as someone who is fully immersed in the story. The key ingredient is something researchers call absorption. This presents itself as being so involved in a story that it starts to feel real, that the characters feel like people you actually know. That kind of deep, willing attention is what changes us. This like any skill can fade if we stop practising it.
Our world is not built for this kind of attention
Here is the hard truth. Almost everything around us is designed to break our focus. Content is made to be fast, wide and easy to scroll past. It is not slow, deep and worth sitting with. Reading a novel requires something different. It asks you to stay with a character’s pain without rushing to fix it. It asks you to live with uncertainty, to not know what happens next, to keep going anyway. These are not comfortable things. But they are important ones. Empathy is not just a personality trait some people are born with. It is a skill. And like all skills, it needs to be built, used, and maintained.
This is bigger than just books
This is not about saying that books are better than films or podcasts or any other kind of storytelling. Theatre, oral traditions, and cinema can all move us deeply. What matters is not the format, it is the quality of attention we bring to it.
But reading, especially fiction, offers something rare. It places you directly inside another person’s mind. It puts you inside someone else’s mind. That is the closest most of us will ever get to truly knowing another person.
What are we actually losing?
If fewer people are reading deeply and the evidence suggests that’s exactly what’s happening, we shouldn’t treat it as just a cultural shift. It may be one of the quieter reasons genuine connection feels harder. Why civil conversations feel rarer. Why we struggle to solve problems together.
We say the world is more divided than ever and we blame politics, algorithms, the usual suspects. But maybe, before any of that, we lost the ability to truly picture each other.
And literature, at its best, teaches us how to do exactly that.
What we owe each other
When we stop reading, we do not just lose stories. We lose practice in the most human thing there is, the ability to hold another person’s world inside us, even for a little while.
